Biz Smart has been approved by Apple and is now available to download for FREE from the App Store. Here is the iTunes link
I have my Biz Smart presentation in a few hours. Here are my presentation slides:
Presentation Slides
Finally Biz Smart is all done and tested! The microsite is up and promotional video is produced! You can view all the virtual companies that have been created by the users on a Google map on the microsite!
Woohoo! Biz Smart had been installed on my iPhone and I’ve spent all day testing it, it all seems to be working fine so fingers crossed! Here are some photos:
Main Menu
Chance
Statistics
Shop
Challenge
Shop companies list
I had a meeting with Katina earlier today, who specializies in e-learning, and she really liked my project idea, which made me feel great as I wasn’t sure if I was going in the right direction. I showed her what I have done so far and what I intend to do.
Katina said that it was a perfect example of social learning and also gave me some other points to consider. She said I could also add ‘chance’ to my game to make it more interesting and create different paths for the players to follow. So I decided I’m going to add a randomly generated ‘chance’ every time the player logs in to play and they will have 1 out of 5 chance to get something like: ” I’m sorry but there was a fire in your warehouse and you have lost all your stock and assets!” I will need to think of a few more examples and implement the effect of each one of them on the game.
Thinking about different game paths, I also decided to add a ‘take credit’ option to the shop rather just ‘buy now’. I believe this will demonstrate the definition of cash flow better and will make it even more realistic because there are many cases when credit is used in real life trading.
So the final idea that I decided to start implementing is a mobile social business simulator, which I decided to call Biz Smart. Biz Smart will be a multiplayer game, players from all over the world will be able to create virtual businesses that they will have to manage over time until they go bankrupt, just like in a Tamagotchi you would look after a virtual pet over a period of time until it dies.
Based on a social learning theory, I thought that it will be great for the players to be able to communicate with each other and create business deals with each other’s virtual companies. To make it even more realistic I want to pull exchange rates and calculate real-life distances between the companies to work out the postage costs for their products.
The aim of the game will be to get to the top of the learder board with the best business rating score (just like in IBM’s innov8 game) I also want to add a challenge mode to the game to make the player concentrate on a particular element of business management that he is not so good at. This is where the adaptive teaching machine model comes in. The system will work out what the student’s main weakness is at that point of time based on his performance so far and will generate a specific challenge. Here is how it will work:
I now have a month before the deadline to plan out this application and build it. Its not a lot of time considering such applications usually take a team to build and they never do it in a month. (I read this somewhere while researching designing learning applications!)
Here are some of the currently existing business simulation games:
For 11-14 year olds (5-8 graders, US) studying Social Studies and Economics in school.
Students become international traders from one of six continents: Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, North America or South America. They negotiate prices with buyers and sellers from the other continents. Sometimes they are thwarted from trading by barriers, and they come to understand how the IMF, by fostering free trade, enhances the flow of goods and services worldwide.
Better Business Choices:
This game gives you the opportunity to build your business from scratch. Will you make the right decisions about market conditions and select the right products, suppliers, energy and other vital ingredients to make sure your business survives in the long term?
This game is a single player game that has an option of 3 world scenarios.
Better Business Dilemmas:
You are about to experience what it can be like to manage social and environmental issues in a business – are you up to the challenge? As the new Chief Executive Officer (i.e. the boss) of your company you will be asked to make some decisions. You will have to make the best choices you can as you guide your company through the next twelve months.
The NZIM Business Challenge is a business simulation where teams or individuals from around New Zealand compete against each other in the running of a fictitious company. The business decisions made each period are entered into the simulation website, where the computer simulation analyses the effects on the competing companies.
Innov8 is a state of the art 3D business simulator for Business Process Management (BPM), a ‘serious game’,
which takes participants through the entire lifecycle of discovery, collaboration, optimization, and innovation of a fictional company’s business processes.
INN0V8 teaches the fundamentals of Business Process Management (BPM) by allowing you to virtually
participate in a BPM project derived from IBM’s real world experiences. The game is intended to provide users with an understanding of the entire lifecycle of discovery, collaboration, and optimization of a company business processes.
All these games are good for what they are inteded to do but they are all computer based. In developing countries access to a personal computer is limited, however, almost everyone has a mobile phone. This is why I would like to use these projects and create a similar application but for a mobile phone. I want to use social learning theory and adaptive teaching machine model as the basis for my application integrated with the idea of a business simulator.
After a lot of reseach and thinking I had a list of elements that my project should/will consist of:
- Social learning, multi-user
- Adapting teaching, caters for each student individually
- Mobile application
- Helps to bridge the digital divide
- Educate people with low technical knowledge
- Bring developing countries capital
- Simple so it works on low end handsets
- Innovative, has never been done before
I’ve analysed this list and came up with an idea of a social multiplayer business simulator game. But this would not just be a learning fun game but more of a ’serious game’, aimed at over 18s, who want to learn how to run a business. I believe this can help some people overcome the fear of starting their own businesses and others can use their virtual business for parctice before the real thing, because simulation is a system that reacts in way similar to the real world, and thus teaches us about that world in the process. Subsequently, such application can increase the number of businesses in developing countries and improve their foreign trade, which can bring a lot of capital and help bridge the digital divide.
A game that I am thinking of creating would not be like a tycoon game, which are usually made mainly for entertainment but you still learn business elements from them. My game would be a serious game for people who are serious about learning business management.
“Serious games are designed with the intention of improving some specific aspect of learning, and players come to serious games with that expectation. Serious games are used in emergency services training, in military training, in corporate education, in health care, and in many other sectors of society. They can also be found at every level of education, at all kinds of schools and universities around the world. Game genre, complexity, and platforms are as varied as those found in casual games. Play, an important contributor to human development, maturation, and learning, is a mandatory ingredient of serious games.” (Derryberry A. 2007 in Serious games:online games for learning: http://www.adobe.com/resources/elearning/pdfs/serious_games_wp.pdf)
Research on adaptive teaching machine theory has also led me to the social learning theory, which focuses on the learning that occurs within a social context. It considers that people learn from one another, including such concepts as observational learning, imitation, and modeling. This theory was originated by Albert Bandura.
People learn through observing others’ behavior, attitudes, and outcomes of those behaviors. “Most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others, one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” (Bandura). Social learning theory explains human behavior in terms of continuous reciprocal interaction between cognitive, behavioral, and environmental influences.
A lot of today’s technology relies on user’s social behavior, the Internet has connected people around the world through blogs and social networks. Social theory seems like a perfect learning model to apply to my mobile learning application.
I had a meeting with Gianni last mounth and showed him my latest idea. He said that I should do some more research on the Conversation Theory and try and figure out how I can tie it in within a mobile learning application effectively.
I did some research on this theory and came across a very interesting article by Usman Haque (2007) called The Architectural Relevance of Gordon Pask. (View PDF) This paper looks at Pask’s theories and projects. A particular project that got my attention was the Self-Adaptive Keyboard Instructor (SAKI), designed by
Pask and Robin McKinnon-Wood in 1956, which was essentially a system for teaching people how to increase speed and accuracy in typing alphabetic and numeric symbols using a 12-key keyboard.
Self-Adaptive Keyboard Instructor
SAKI is based on a concept of an adaptive teaching machine, mimics the possible relationship between a human teacher and student. A teacher is able to respond directly to a student’s apparent needs by focusing at times on particular aspects of the material to be studied if weaknesses are measured in these areas. This is achieved in Pask’s constructed system via the dynamic modulation of three variables.The machine responds not just to the student’s actual input, but also changes the way it responds on the basis
of past interactions. The student responds to the machine just as the machine is responding to the student, and the nature of their goals at any point in time is dependent on the particular history of response the other has provided.
Believed to be an instrumentation panel from the Eucrates project (1955), Gordon Pask developed the system with Robin McKinnon-Wood and CEG Bailey to simulate the relationship between teacher and student. His use of variables for concepts like ‘awareness’, ‘obstinacy’ and ‘oblivescence’ are core to the system.
Here are some other references that I came across on Pask’s theories:
Nakauchi Y., Naphattalung P., Takahashi T., Matsubara T. and Kashiwagi E. (2003) Proposal and Evaluation of Natural Language Human-Robot Interface System based on Conversation Theory [online] Available: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fstamp%2Fstamp.jsp%3Ftp%3D%26isnumber%3D27829%26arnumber%3D1241625&authDecision=-203
Feinberg W. and Odeshoo J. (2000) EDUCATIONAL THEORY IN THE FIFTIES: THE BEGINNING OF A CONVERSATION [online] Available: http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/eps/Educational-Theory/2%20Feinberg-Odeshoo.pdf
Fernandez Maria (2008) Gordon Pask: Cybernetic Polymath [online] Available: http://aminima.net/wp/?p=858&language=en
Sharples Mike (2002) Disruptive Devices: Mobile Technology for Conversational Learning [online] Available: http://www.eee.bham.ac.uk/sharplem/Papers/ijceell.pdf
Sharples Mike (2005) Learning As Conversation: Transforming Education in the Mobile Age [online] Available: http://www.fil.hu/mobil/2005/Sharples_final.pdf
De Rosnay M. and Hughes C. (2006) Conversation and theory of mind: Do children talk their way to socio-cognitive understanding? [online] Available: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=17603398
Scott Bernard (2001) Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory: A Domain Independent Constructivist Model of Human Knowing. [online] Available: http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/pub/fos/pdf/scott.pdf
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